Humanities Crash Course Week 50: Going Meta

Exploring ways of experiencing art — and its effects — by analyzing it at dfferent levels.

Week 50 of the humanities crash course had me going meta. That is, I delved into criticism: works about other works. In particular, I read essays by Susan Sontag, Walter Benjamin, and José Ortega y Gasset about art’s meaning and interpretation. I also read two chapters from Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses. For my weekly audiovisual fix, I looked at classic photography (appropriate, given the Sontag essays), listened to Hip-Hop and Motown music, and watched another classic 1980s action film.

Readings

Let’s start with Sontag. I read four essays included in a collection called A Susan Sontag Reader. Very brief summaries:

• Notes On Camp (1964) describes camp, a particular aesthetic sensibility that emphasizes style over substance. It’s ironic, playful, and subversive, elevating artifice over authenticity — but affectionately.

• On Style (1965) argues style isn’t decoration, but integral to what a work of art is; we can’t detach the two.

• Against Interpretation (1966) is a critique of the modern tendency to read meanings into works of art. We should resist interpreting what we’re seeing, and focus instead on what’s coming in through our senses.

• The Image-World (1977) explores the impact of photography on our perceptions of the world: it both democratizes and commodifies images, desensitizing us to what is actually there and making the world appear more consumable.

This latter essay in particular relates to the next on the list, Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). Like Sontag, Benjamin is concerned with what the reproduction of images does to our perceptions of what we see. He argues that mechanical reproduction devalues the aura of a work of art. Where we previously experienced individual works in context, now they’re detached from place and role.

Mechanical reproduction changes our perception of both authenticity and the cultural authority of works of art. Absent their traditional roles and values, their function changes — e.g., they become a tool for politics. Benjamin (a Marxist) wants the left to politicize art to counter Fascism’s aestheticization of politics.

On to Ortega y Gasset, starting with The Dehumanization of Art (1925), a sort of apology for Modern art, which was (and remains) widely unpopular. “Dehumanization” here isn’t a value judgment. Instead, Ortega y Gasset notes Modern art’s move away from relatable subjects toward more stylized and sometimes abstract works, which he celebrates as a positive development. Abandoning realistic and romantic attributes of 19th century art deepens the split between the intelligentsia who is “in the know” and the vast majority of people who aren’t.

I also read chapters six and eight from Ortega y Gasset’s La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses) (1929). Yes, I read this one in the original Spanish. Ortega y Gasset outlines the rise of the “mass-man” in the 20th century, who is driven by society’s comforts to conformity, mediocrity, and a lack of individuality. gpt-4o put it well:

This shift threatens intellectual and cultural elites, as well as liberal democracy, because mass man demands rights without responsibilities. Ortega y Gasset warns that this societal transformation could lead to the erosion of excellence and the imposition of a homogenous, authoritarian rule driven by the whims of the undifferentiated masses.

Ortega y Gasset didn’t mean the mass-man as a social class, but a particular way of being, and warns of the risks of losing these more exigent minorities who demand more of themselves and of society as a whole. While he had Fascism and syndicalism in mind, we see this dynamic play out in today’s populist movements of both the left and right.

Audiovisual

Music: Motown and Hip-Hop. Variety is the key benefit of streaming services — and is especially welcome when exploring categories such as these, which include so many artists.

Arts: photographs by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, and Edward Weston. Some of these images are hard to study objectively as images separated from what we interpret them to mean. Others verge on abstraction.

Pepper No. 30 (1930) by Edward Weston; posthumous print by his son Cole Weston via Wikimedia

Cinema: DIE HARD (1988), another classic action film directed by John McTiernan.

You could argue this film (and PREDATOR, the previous McTiernan entry on my list) isn’t on the same level as some of the others in this course. But I’d never seen this classic “Christmas” film — and as a bonus, it proved an interesting subject for this week’s readings.

Reflection

I wrote “Christmas” in quotes because since its release, DIE HARD has ironically become something of a holiday classic. While set on Christmas Eve and featuring lots of Christmas imagery, this film is pretty far in spirit from traditional end-of-year themes and rituals as possible: even though it ends with reconciliation, the film revels in mayhem, murder, destruction, cruelty, and irony rather than authenticity, love, warmth, and compassion. I take it to be a camp Christmas classic, in the Sontag sense.

DIE HARD can also be appreciated on different levels. At its simplest, it’s a straight-ahead action movie. But there are underlying messages about foreign influence on America and changing gender roles during the latter half of the 20th century. The film’s Wikipedia page has a long section on its underlying themes.

My kids and I enjoyed it “superficially” while consuming massive amounts of popcorn. I suspect this is more in keeping with Sontag’s formalist approach. But also to her point, it’s not possible to detach its stylistic presentation from its content: the Christmas setting, cinematography, geographic location, soundtrack, script are all essential to the film’s effectiveness both as entertainment and as a vehicle for (potentially political) messaging.

Notes on Note-taking

This week, I started again with handwritten notes. This time, I had my notebook and iPad side-by-side. I took notes on paper as I reflected both on what I’d read and summaries of the readings in Wikipedia. Then, I wrote longer thoughts in Obsidian based on my handwritten notes.

I expanded these Obsidian notes with highlights and notes I’d made while reading in Kindle. As usual, these sync into my vault via the Readwise plugin. After I finished, I fed these notes to ChatGPT, which helped me correct some minor misunderstandings.

While somewhat time consuming, this process ensures I have a better grasp on the readings. A potential improvement would be re-reading the texts after making this first set of notes: with a better sense of what the readings are about, I could look out for nuances.

Up Next

Alas, we must keep moving — we’re almost at the end of the course! Gioia recommends Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, Brave New World. I read it decades ago and am long overdue for a revisit. Again, there’s a YouTube playlist for the videos I’m sharing here. See you next week!

This post originally appeared on my blog.